


Nesting

by BlueCosmicStorm



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Acceptance, Brothers, Childhood, Domestic Fluff, Gen, Home, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Light Angst, Nesting, Young Dean Winchester, Young Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-07-13 21:59:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16026803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueCosmicStorm/pseuds/BlueCosmicStorm
Summary: Sam doesn't really understand. But maybe he's starting to.





	Nesting

On the road, Dean’s a slob; always has been. He leaves his clothes in piles on the floor, empty take-out and alcohol paraphernalia litter the bedside tables of motel rooms, and the mess he leaves in the bathroom after cleaning up...well, the less said about that, the better.

In the bunker, however, Dean’s domestic. He likes things organized, tidy. He washes dishes, keeps the bathroom in decent shape, and has actually managed to turn one of the tiny cells that pass for rooms here into something...homey. He’s a surprisingly decent cook, and Sam thinks Dean gets some real joy out of cooking, especially for Sam. He even polishes the crystal tumbler glasses and decanter the boys keep their whiskey in. He, of course, keeps that stocked at all times, even sometimes splurging on fancy beers and a nice bottle of scotch.

It’s almost as though Dean needs to differentiate between the two: the road and the bunker.

Sam, on the other hand, is meticulous on the road. He keeps everything carefully organized, a lesson he learned early on, after he left a box of crayons behind at a motel when he was six. He was often bored at the motels and in the car, so he took any distraction as a sacred rite. They’d been in a hurry, though, John eager to get to a job the next town over, and Sam had not realized the crayons were missing until they were ten miles down the road.

His father had, without hesitation, refused to go back for them. “That’s what happens when you don’t hold onto your stuff, Sam,” he’d said, and Sam had vowed to never leave anything behind again. Dean had stolen him a box of crayons two days later. He said it was because he couldn’t stand to listen to Sam whine, but Sam remembers the way Dean had ruffled his hair after he’d deposited them in front of him and told him not to let Dad see them for a few days, when they both knew he would have forgotten about the incident entirely.

And so Sam keeps everything in its place when he packs and unpacks, and generally leaves a place the way he found it, as though he’d never been there at all. He cleans his guns methodically - which _everyone_ should do - and he organizes his toiletries in the bag the same way each time. It’s efficient.

At the bunker, Sam isn’t so enamored of the place as Dean is. He’s not exactly a slob, but he also doesn’t treat the place with kid gloves. He mostly just sees a base of operations, and he doesn’t get why Dean’s so excited.

“I’m nesting,” Dean tells him, exasperated, as though that explains everything, and Sam simply shakes his head and laughs at him.

He supposes it does, though, on further examination. Dean actually remembers what it means to have a home, and it must grate on him to have moved from place to place his whole life. He imagines what it must have been like for Dean, barely five years old, ripped from his mother and their home, only to be shuffled to motel after motel, all of them spartan and dirty, not a feeling of home to be found. It’s a wonder what would have been worse in those first few months, Sam’s infant tears, or their father’s desperate grieving. Then to never have all that stop...it must have been horrible for Dean.

It’s probably why he settled so neatly into life with Lisa and Ben. Sam, soul or not, had noticed how very idyllic it all seemed, if you took away the horrors Dean had seen in his life, and the ever-looming threat of something evil to eventually destroy his little dream.

Sam can’t really understand it all. He has no memory of such things; not of home, John’s grief for a beloved wife and mother of his sons, nor the sweet, lost boy Dean must have been. No, Sam only remembers a driven, vengeance-fueled father, and a brother who had long ago tamped down any hints of softness and optimism to become a dutiful son and loyal brother, to become the warrior and lieutenant his father had required him to be.

For Sam, “homes” are something exotic and strange, like an undiscovered tribe from the Amazon would be to anyone else....like _his_ life would be to anyone else. He’d had dinners with the families of girls he liked, and found himself intrigued by the calm normalcy of it. He coveted this normalcy, longed for it, perhaps mostly because he didn’t understand it. He’d tried for it with Jess, for that elusive normal happiness that seemed to be missing from his childhood. But that hadn’t worked out.

Any chance of happiness always got destroyed for the Winchesters. It was just a matter of time.

Perhaps that’s why Sam can’t simply “settle in”. He’s just waiting for the other shoe to drop, for yet another insane conspiracy to take this place from them, like it took their mother, and Jess; like it took Bobby.

So, no, Sam can’t settle in. It’s just not practical, and he’s become nothing if not practical.

Then Charlie arrives, and Dorothy and the Wicked Witch, and it sounds like the start of a cheesy porno Sam might accidentally walk in and catch Dean watching. But the bunker’s been invaded, and they defend it like...like it’s theirs. Like it’s their home. They roust the Wicked Witch, and clean up the mess, and send Charlie off for adventure they are sure will destroy something in her...just like it did to them.

And Sam starts to feel it. Starts to feel that indefinable thing. He doesn’t come to it the same way Dean does, but he’s getting there in his own time and his own way. And he starts to feel that shred of optimism he sees in Dean.

Maybe this time. Maybe they can have this, as unconventional as it is.

_Home._

 

**Author's Note:**

> Well, there's my first Supernatural fic. Bring on the comments, folks!


End file.
